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Saturday, October 29, 2016

Police bungle search for missing couple

Jeremy Sim 41 and his wife Marma Sim 38, left Esperance on 18 October to go camping but when they failed to return last weekend, their three daughters raised the alarm.

Kirsty Biggers and her father finally found the Sims' car at 10.30 pm on Thursday night, 200 kms north-west of Esperance.

Kirsty said "I'm no hero, I'm just a friend who wouldn't give up, it was my dad, my dad is the hero in all this, if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't have come across them at all."

"We knew they were responsible, we knew they were experienced and the number one rule is - don't leave your car - so we knew that where their car was, they would be there too."

The couple had just 350 ml of water left and were very hungry when a gash in the radiator of their 4WD left them stranded on a remote bush track for 10 days.

The couple had a tale to tell about the incompetence of the police search and how they lost hope when they heard on the radio that they had stopped searching.

They said they saw the plane clearly overhead and burnt the mud flaps on the car to create more smoke and lit a fire as 'big as a house'. They even marked out SOS clearly on the ground, so what went wrong?

"Obviously they are a little upset that they saw the plane but didn't get located" Goldfields Esperance Assistant District Officer Tony Colfer said.

The couple were towed back to Esperance to be reunited with their three daughters aged from 10 to 18.